A perfect time, then, for the release of “Birth Story: Ina May Gaskin & the Farm Midwives,” a granola ode to natural childbirth that makes you want to hop into a tub of warm water and start pushing. Filled with glowing, about-to-pop women alternately smooching their partners and bearing down, this beamingly one-sided documentary from Sara Lamm and Mary Wigmore traces the evolution of Ms. Gaskin from hippie co-founder of the Farm — a self-reliant community in rural Tennessee — to self-taught midwife extraordinaire.

Described by one former resident as “a wonderful experiment,” the Farm, still operational after more than four decades, has a controversial history that “Birth Story” tactfully elides. Also brushed aside are statistics on less-than-optimal outcomes, if any, for its midwives, though the “for-profit hospital system” is roundly criticized.

However valid those criticisms, no doctors appear in the film to rebut or elucidate; instead, we have a brief news clip of Diane Sawyer warning us of rising mortality among women during childbirth that “raises questions” about Caesarean sections — a factoid that can only alarm expectant mothers planning a hospital birth.

Nonetheless, it’s difficult to resist Ms. Gaskin’s commitment to putting the kindness back in confinement. Pro-nature and anti-epidural, her beliefs — like some of the film’s images — are not for the fainthearted. But then, neither is motherhood.